In a world with an intellectual history of seven thousand years behind it, where do Pakistanis stand, what are they doing, what do they aspire to be, and what ought they to be doing? This Blog takes Notes of all of that ...

On
Sunday, September 8, 2013, Asif Ali Zardari, the leader of the Pakistan People’s
Party (PPP) stepped down as the president of Pakistan. Many will write about
this historic day as it represents the first time a democratically elected
president completed a five-year term, followed by a peaceful transition to
another democratically elected government. Most of Pakistan’s leaders have been
removed from office in coups d’tat or have been forced to resign. Zardari is
the only one to leave office with a formal lunch hosted by his political
rivals.

Although
Zardari’s tenure in office was characterized by judicial activism and media
opposition that often bordered on hatred, it will be remembered for its
tolerance of that criticism. Since Pakistan’s independence 66 years ago, its
politics have been intensely polarized. Opponents of the subsequent governments
have been routinely jailed and even killed after being labeled “enemies of the
state.” Zardari, however, chose to take the
criticism, preferring the noise of a fledgling democracy to the enforced
silence of superficial stability.

Polarization
in Pakistan has not ended but it has diminished, at least among the major
electable national leaders and parties. Much of what it took to achieve this
historic moment is publicly known, but there are many stressful and difficult
moments known to just a few. Perhaps one day the entirety of the struggle to
deliver democracy and strengthen Pakistan’s parliamentary roots will become
public knowledge.

What
most people do know is that since the February 2008 parliamentary election, and
especially after the resignation of former president and military strongman
Pervez Musharraf, there has been a powerful lobby in Pakistan hankering for the
“good old days” when the reins of authority were held
solely by the country’s powerful generals, bureaucrats, and judges, who were
assisted by powerful media barons and urban industrialists.

When
Zardari took office, many politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, and citizens
had very little idea of who he was. The picture painted by the country’s
intelligence agencies and the permanent establishment thrived in a nation
obsessed by rumors and hungry for conspiracy theories.

Pakistan’s
urban elite have often been more comfortable with military rule and
historically, elected leaders have been denigrated as incompetent and corrupt.
It was not always easy to muddy and blacken the image of democratic leader
Benazir Bhutto, especially on the international stage or with her party
members, who stood by her like a rock. But it was very easy to scapegoat
Zardari, the businessman-consort of the leading pro-democracy politician. He
was accused of many things over the past two and a half decades without any
charge ever being proved in any court. Anyone who has spent time in political
life knows well that once your public image has been defined for you, it is
often impossible to change that image.

As
such, Zardari took little interest in restoring his personal image once he
became president. He did not care that analysts and journalists tied to
Pakistan’s establishment described him as an “accidental president” and repeated unproved past allegations against him. Instead, his
focus was to redress the imbalance in Pakistan’s power structure.

Unelected
presidents and military dictators had, in the past, accumulated power in that
office at the expense of Pakistan’s parliament and its provincial governments,
the constituting units of the Pakistani federation. Zardari worked with the
various parties in parliament to shape amendments that restored the
constitution to its original form. Because of his efforts, Pakistan can now be
a functional parliamentary democracy and a proper federation, with real authority
in the hands of its provinces.

Hardline
opponents constantly claimed that Zardari and the PPP government, led by Prime
Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, would be gone in three months. This was then
consistently repeated by the sages on Pakistani cable television and by print
columnists. The entire effort was to destabilize the government itself, but it
didn’t work. Instead, it undermined the effectiveness of the government and
deferred tough economic decisions.

The
relentless pressure from many quarters, including the Supreme Court of
Pakistan, eventually resulted in Gilani’s removal over a contempt of court
charge, something unheard of in any democracy. This judicial activism and the discretionary
use of the court’s suo moto powers paralyzed the executive branch of
government.

PPP
cabinet ministers and administrative heads of government departments and
agencies spent a lot more time answering frivolous petitions in court than they
did in their offices governing the country. But with the May 2013 elections,
which resulted in a new government led by the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz
party, the question of the PPP government’s performance is now history.

Zardari’s
legacy will instead be the strengthening of the democratic process. Out of
office, he can now work on rebuilding the PPP so that the party can seek a
mandate from the people during the next election to actually govern and deliver
- something it was not allowed to do last time.

While
Pakistan’s constitution bars the outgoing president from running for elective
office for two years, Zardari is not prohibited from generating ideas and
direction for his party. Hopefully, he will reform the party by bringing in new
blood not associated with allegations of corruption and inefficiency. The PPP
remains a mass political party that needs to be rejuvenated to make the case
for a liberal, tolerant, pluralist and fair Pakistan. Zardari’s son, Bilawal Bhutto,
who is co-leader of the party, has already spoken of that need publicly on
social media.

If
the democratic environment, free of excessive polarization, which Zardari
sought to create in the last five years, lasts for the next five, there will be
room for Pakistani politicians to debate the country’s fundamental issues:
terrorism, international isolation and economic reform. [The News]

[The
author at present is a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in
Washington, DC. The author is former adviser to former President Asif Ali
Zardari, former PPP MNA and wife of Pakistan’s ex-ambassador to US Husain
Haqqani.]

The Blogger

The blogger cherishes a cosmopolitan spirit; he is a moralist; a rationalist; a philosopher; a political philosopher; he believes in Classical Liberalism, as a Theory of Conduct.
He has substantially contributed to the founding of the first free market think tank of Pakistan, Alternate Solutions Institute.
He is a writer who wrote / published dozens of articles on a variety of issues, and is author of 4 books.
He wrote / published short-stories in Punjabi, a regional language of Pakistan.
He composes poetry both in Urdu and Punjabi, and has already published one collection.